


Without Him

by supernaturalandshiz



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Panic Attacks, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Steve Rogers Dies, just a small one, offscreen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 16:27:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29762400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/supernaturalandshiz/pseuds/supernaturalandshiz
Summary: Bucky's life in relation to Steve Rogers.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Sam Wilson, James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers
Kudos: 4





	Without Him

James Barnes had always been a creature of habit. It was one of the ways he and Steve were different. While the younger was free to prance around and drop any commitments or associates, James tended to hold on to things. 

When he came to in 2016 as an entirely new person, he was certainly disoriented. His only link to the life he lived in the 20th century was his best friend, fighting for him just as hard as he always had. The first thing he did after the fight with Tony was research. Steve still had access to government databases so he was able to look for his siblings. He was heartbroken to learn that his youngest sister, Rebecca had died only recently.

Growing up together and later sharing an apartment, the two were close. Neither had many other friends and didn’t care to look for any. This detail and the fact that Bucky was a sentimental, gave him an attachment to the other.

When the letter showed in their mail in the early 40s with the big letters printed across the top, ‘ORDER TO REPORT FOR INDUCTION,’ James could have cried. The raging war hadn’t been his largest concern - scraping together enough money to eat was a more pressing matter - but now he would be thrown into the battle. Telling Steve that he enlisted - a shitty lie, but believeable enough - probably wasn’t a great idea because the asthmatic immediately started trying to follow in his footsteps. 

The look on Steve’s face when he told the kid he was shipping out for England the next morning was nearly crippling. To avoid the conversation getting too serious, he shoved the morning paper toward him. ‘World Exposition of Tomorrow,’ seemed exciting enough for his last evening in America. Little did he know what the war had in store for him.

The sun was peeking over the skyline when Bucky hugged Steve goodbye. He barely kept in tears until he closed the shitty apartment door behind him. Through blurry memories, he remembered collapsing into a cab and sobbing all the way to the docks. He recalled the asshole driver calling him a pansy when he climbed out. 

The grimy ship was nothing compared to their apartment in terms of ‘in dire need of an upgrade,’ and it made him laugh. _God, what is Stevie going to do about the cracked out plumbing without me,_ he thought bitterly. _So much for ‘I’m with you ‘til the end of the line.’_

No one had any idea how long this war would go on. He could come back to a different man as a different man. He hoped Steve did something with his life, like become an artist or doctor. Hoped the kid wouldn't get himself killed.

He wasn't overseas for more than six months before Schmidt gave the order to storm Azzano. War was hard and they learned that quickly. Bucky had seen too many innocents slaughtered to ever think straight again and watching the men he befriended take bullets around him was horrifying. 

Not one of the men in the 107th could say precisely what went wrong. One minute they were walking the streets of a small Italian town and the next, they were in a desperate shootout and half of them were dead or running. Bucky had rounded a corner only to be hit with the butt of a gun. What happened after that was foggy until Steve showed up. 

All he remembered was Steve, coming to the rescue, pulling him up from the table he was strapped to and dragging him to safety. That was a common theme for them it seems, saving each other’s asses. It was jarring, seeing Steve looking completely different than when he left, _Did he go through puberty or something?_ He was taller and it was scary. He asked if it was permanent as he staggered down the hallway. _Fuck, guess it is._

Schmidt’s real face was a bit of a plot twist. It was quite concerning to watch the man tear his ‘skin’ off but then there was an explosion and they were trapped so his concern was redirected. Almost falling to his death was nerve-wracking but he got through it. 

Steve’s words were etched into his brain, “Just go! Get out of here!” Who was that kid to think he was the one that got to save Bucky? _“No! Not without you!”_ He liked to think that Steve would have made it out of there whether Bucky had refused to leave or not because the weight of the alternative was too much. 

It felt symbolic to march back to camp at Steve’s right side, the last of his infantry following. _I got it all wrong_ , he thought, _maybe I’ve been following his lead the whole time._ “Hey! Let’s hear it for Captain America,” he had cried. People clapped and cheered and he was filled with an unmatchable pride. 

That night, at a run-down bar, Steve asked, “You ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?” And he was.

“Hell no. That little guy from Brooklyn who was too dumb not to run away from a fight. I’m following him.” Leaving Steve was a thought that never crossed Bucky’s mind. 

They went through bases like candy, leaving plans in ruins and the German army with a lack of soldiers. Standing on a cliff, facing death, Bucky was nostalgic, “Remember when I made you ride the Cyclone at Coney Island?”

Bucky had saved money for weeks to make it to the amusement park which he had used to persuade Steve to get on the ride. “Yeah, and I threw up?”

Unsurprisingly, that day was close to both their hearts. “This isn’t payback is it?”

Steve smiled, “Now why would I do that?”

The train was moving like a bullet and jumping onto it was about the dumbest idea that Steve could have come up with but Bucky couldn’t deny that getting into it was important.

He didn’t know what he expected in the military, but hanging off of a high-speed train was _not_ it. Neither was falling.

It felt like time stopped. It didn’t even feel like he was falling; just a sense of weightlessness. Then, he was unconscious. 

Coming to, lying in the snow was agony. He tried to make sense of his injuries to have a sense of what he could do to prolong death, but his thoughts were muddled by the pure _pain_. He laid suffering, moving in and out of consciousness for hours until he heard footsteps. He assumed that the crunching of snow signaled Steve coming for him; oh how wrong he was.

He doesn’t remember everything but everything that he does is coated in teeth grinding discomfort. He remembers part of the torture; his own screams, the laughter of the Hydra agents around him, the fights with other super-soldiers, etc. Steve said it was good that he couldn’t remember, something about his mind repressing trauma to protect itself. 

Personally, he thought that was bullshit. If it was true, why did he remember the killings? It was difficult to look into Tony’s eyes when there were days when all he could see was his father. They had only had a few conversations, but he met the older Stark when he was a young genius and it was definitely disturbing to watch the life bleed from his eyes.

Maria’s screams often shook him awake at night, amongst other things. Tony could hold a mean grudge, yet Bucky often found the man being kind to him.

He remembers nearly killing Steve with some part of his scrambled mind screaming at him to stop. Remembers dragging him from the water for a reason he couldn’t explain. Now that he was in control of himself again, he thanks the stars that he did.

_Being unconscious sucks_ , Bucky thought. _Seems I’ve been doing that a lot recently_ . He must have made a noise because Steve came jogging in. The first thing he noticed after he called out for his friend was that his metal arm was trapped. _Understandable_.

“Which Bucky am I talking to,” Steve demanded.

As much as a prick Steve was about literally anyone else, Bucky knew that nostalgia was the way to go here, “Your mom’s name was Sarah.” He remembered her. She was kind and always offered her home to Bucky. She raised her son well. “You used to wear newspaper in your shoes.” More accurately, he wore newspaper in _Bucky’s_ shoes because the idiot had destroyed his and the prices on loafers had just skyrocketed. 

“Can’t read that in a museum,” Steve remarked, smiling.

“Just like that, we’re supposed to be cool?” Bucky didn’t know the other man, just that they had fought. 

“What did I do?”

“Enough, ”Steve sighed.

Bucky inhaled sharply, “Oh, god, I knew this would happen. Everything Hydra put inside me is still there. All he had to do was say the goddamn words.”

“Who was he?” 

“I don’t know.” He didn’t know; it was just some dude with the ability to get into his mind and make him a puppet again. _Totally normal._

“People are dead. The bombing, the setup… the doctor did all that just to get ten minutes with you. I need you to do better than ‘I don’t know.’” Bucky was sidetracked for a moment, still taken aback by how _different_ it was for Steve to be all muscular and assertive. 

Then, he thought about which mission report the guy had asked for. “He wanted to know about Siberia. Where I was kept. He wanted to know exactly where.”

“Why would he need to know that?”

“Because I’m not the only Winter Soldier.”

The conversation continued but when Sam and Steve turned to whisper to each other, he had time to think. Steve was treating him like they weren’t best friends and it was getting to dredge up a fear that had been instilled in him for so long. 

Bucky had been abandoned before, by classmates that scoffed and told him he needed to learn boundaries, by girlfriends that just wanted sex, but never by Steve. Steve was a serial abandoner, though. Dropped out of school and sold his house when his mother died, tried to enlist too many times for it to be legal, and somehow ended up in the future with him, seemingly okay with the new technology and everyone they’ve ever known gone.

That didn’t stop him from being worried about all the new people. Later, after the airport battle, he asked, “What’s gonna happen to your friends?” His voice was soft, betraying the softer version of him to try to appeal to Steve’s emotional side.

“Whatever it is, I’ll deal with it.” And if that didn’t sound overwhelmingly like _Steve_ , Bucky didn’t know what would. 

“I don’t know if I’m worth all this, Steve.” He would much prefer to be sitting on their dirty couch listening to a Transatlantic accent drone on about the war or the weather or anything under the sun.

“What you did all those years… you didn’t have a choice.” His voice was somber and Bucky wanted to cry.

“I know.” It didn’t matter, he still killed innocents, something that made him nauseous all those decades ago. “But I did it.”

He was filled with shame when the video flickered across the old screen. Washed with remorse seeing Tony watch his parents die. Choked up with guilt hearing his motorcycle rumble to a stop and the skin against metal and the gunshot. He didn’t have a lot of time to panic because Steve was in danger and he was fighting for his life.

He didn’t want to hurt anyone else, especially not an Avenger, but his life was important enough to him that he could put that aside for a few minutes. There was a lot of metal on metal, then his arm was gone, _Fuck, that was probably expensive_. 

Steve betrayed his friendship with Stark for him. Maybe the kid was just as sentimental as he was. It took dedication and a powerful love to do that and commit war crimes for one person. It was definitely a comical sacrifice.

Maybe it was wishful thinking, maybe it was love, but he was certainly wrong in his judgment because the dumbass was currently sitting in front of him as an elderly - cut that - ancient man. He wanted to scream, cry, punch him in the face, _anything_ , but he couldn’t do anything but blink while Steve explained his situation.

He went back for Peggy. _Maybe God is real and he’s playing a cruel joke on me for messing with those nuns back in the 20s._

Steve wasn’t a sentimental, he was a _romantic_ and if there is one way into a girl's heart, it’s sure as hell gotta be time travel. Ripping apart the fabric of time and space just to stab Bucky directly in the heart.

He should have been happy that his best friend got to spend his life with the girl of his dreams, but he was just bitter. He wasn’t part of that equation _at all_ . Steve hadn’t even _asked_ if he wanted to go back with him. 

Now, James Buchanan Barnes stands, not even forty, while his one-hundred and seven-year-old best friend lay in a hospital bed. The beeping of the heart monitor slowed until it stopped. Sam was crying next to him, curled into himself on the plastic chair, sobbing into his hands. Bucky was pissed, though.

He turned on his heel, storming out of the room. The whole building smelled of medical supplies and it was overwhelming. He would have to pay for the damage, he knew, but his metal hand went through the wall. His fist collided with the plaster again and again until there were arms around his chest, pulling him away.

He was crying now, too, hot tears pouring down his face. It took a few minutes of the sound of blood rushing in his ears to _finally_ make out a muffled voice. “ _Bucky_ calm down, man. It’s going to be okay.”

It wasn’t, Sam was wrong. The _one_ constant in his life was _gone_. He could barely breathe and his thoughts were swimming, but Sam kept talking. “We’ll be okay, ya know. We’ll get through this.”

When his thoughts were calm and he could hear and see again, Sam explained that he had a panic attack. He asked if he wanted to see Steve again, but Bucky just shook his head. “That’s alright, why don’t we just get out of here, then? The doctors and nurses have procedures to follow.”

It was childish, yes, but Bucky couldn’t give a shit. Sam made him _angry_. The asshole had actually tried to tell him, “The legacy of that shield is… complicated,” as if he wasn’t there when Howard Stark made the damn thing.

As if he hadn’t marched blindly into a battle with his best friend only to find out seventy years later that he evidently wasn’t willing to do the same. As if he wasn’t the reason Captain America even made it to 27. As if Sam knew what the hell he was talking about. 

His anger was petty, of course. Sam was one of the main reasons he wasn’t in a maximum-security prison, rotting away. Yet, his skin crawled whenever they were together. But, if Bucky was anything, it wasn’t selfish. 

Less than a year after Tony and Natasha, the world was once again mourning the loss of another Avenger. The people needed a hero and Steve had given the shield to Sam, they might as well put it to use. _It’s what Steve wanted_ , he reminded himself when Sharon pointed a gun at him and when Sam asked him what was happening in his ‘cyborg brain’ and even when he almost fell from a semi speeding down the highway.

He found that Sam reminded him of Steve. They were both impulsive and had the same philosophy of never running away from a fight. Maybe that was part of what was bothering him. He had clung to Steve, hung onto an idealized version of the man. A version that was with him to the end of the line.

Now, he was flailing for comfort, drowning in a sea of new technology and seventy years worth of history to catch up on. The past was evidently gruesome. There were more wars, a lot of people died. Bucky had learned in World War 2 that he was too empathetic, he cried when the body count of a battle they had in the streets of an Italian town was released.

One piece of history that was so deeply ingrained in him that he didn’t have to read a book on it, was Captain America. He tried to stay away from Steve’s grave in fear of scaring the children that visited. Instead, he found sanctuary in the museums. There were rarely people around him when he bought tickets and stood awkwardly in front of displays.

Sometimes, they played recordings from the war. He would watch them for hours just to hear Steve’s voice. He didn’t realize how bad it was until Sam snuck up on him one day.

“Wow, sometimes I forget how old you are,” he teased while images of explosions and gunfights flashed.

He gave a weak, “Fuck off.”

“Shit dude, are you _crying_?” He hadn’t noticed it, but he was.

“Fuck. I’m supposed to be dead. Look,” he pointed, “that’s Dum Dum Dugan. I looked it up, he’s dead. Sam, _everyone_ is dead.” He watched Steve’s face on the screen, smiling wide while he talked to Bucky.

Sam sat down next to him. They were silent for a long time before Sam spoke again, “He looks at you like you’re his world…” 

His voice was quiet and it rubbed Bucky in all the wrong ways. He looked at Sam, then back to the screen, and sobbed. “Damn, probably. Now he’s gone. That’s Peggy,” he said, thrusting a finger toward Steve’s compass.

“Oh shit. He carried a picture of her with him? Wasn’t that like marriage back then?” Steve was trying for humor, and Bucky was trying to do the same but failed miserably.

They didn’t speak until the film ended, freezing on a frame of Steve giving the camera a thumbs up. “I’m all alone,” he whispered.

“Wait, fuck, hold on,” Sam wracked his brain for what to say. He had counseled a lot of veterans, but they were never one-hundred years old and breaking down. “I know you feel like that because you’re the only survivor of your past, but you're _not_. I’m right here, so is Sharon, so are the remaining Avengers.”

Bucky just glared so he continued. “C’mon, how many veterans suffering from PTSD do you think I’ve seen? I know you Bucky. Not like Steve did, but I’ve known you for a few years now and I’d say that you’ve got what it takes to make it out on the other side of this battle.”

The other gave a wet laugh, “I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if I _want_ to” All of the grief that surrounded him for months was surfacing. “I don’t know _how_.”

Sam was taken aback by how open Bucky was being. “Together.” He stood and offered a hand to the other, “Let’s get out of here.” 

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed. I have Marvel brain rot from the trailer lol.
> 
> I might make this into a series...


End file.
